o the condition of things
which the Gospel found. The world then was like some great field of
cooled lava on the slopes of a volcano, all broken up by a labyrinth
of clefts and cracks, at the bottom of which one can see the flicker
of sulphurous flames. Great gulfs of national hatred, of fierce
enmities of race, language, and religion; wide separations of social
condition, far profounder than anything of the sort which we know,
split mankind into fragments. On the one side was the freeman, on the
other, the slave; on the one side, the Gentile, on the other, the
Jew; on the one side, the insolence and hard-handedness of Roman
rule, on the other, the impotent, and therefore envenomed, hatred of
conquered peoples.

And all this fabric, full of active repulsions and disintegrating
forces, was bound together into an artificial and unreal unity by the
iron clamp of Rome's power, holding up the bulging walls that were
ready to fall--the unity of the slave-gang manacled together for
easier driving. Into this hideous condition of things the Gospel
comes, and silently flings its clasping tendrils over the wide gaps,
and binds the crumbling structure of human society with a new bond,
real and living. We know well enough that that was so, but we are
helped to apprehend it by seeing, as it were, the very process going
on before our eyes, in this message from 'Quartus a brother.'

It reminds us that the very notion of humanity, and of the
brotherhood of man, is purely Christian. A world-embracing society,
held together by love, was not dreamt of before the Gospel came; and
since the Gospel came it is more than a dream. If you wrench away the
idea from its foundation, as people do who talk about fraternity, and
seek to bring it to pass without Christ, it is a mere piece of
Utopian sentiment--a fine dream. But in Christianity it worked. It
works imperfectly enough, God knows. Still there is some reality in
it, and some power. The Gospel first of all produced the thing and
the practice, and then the theory came afterwards. The Church did not
talk much about the brotherhood of man, or the unity of the race; but
simply ignored all distinctions, and gathered into the fold the slave
and his master, the Roman and his subject, fair-haired Goths and
swarthy Arabians, the worshippers of Odin and of Zeus, the Jew and
the Gentile. That actual unity, utterly irrespective of all
distinctions, which came naturally in the train of the Gospel, was